DO I NEED TO FOLLOW YOU?

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1 DO I NEED TO FOLLOW YOU? Investigating the Utility of the Pinterest Follow Mechanism Bluma Gelley and Ajita John bgelley@nyu.edu ajita@avaya.com

2 What is Pinterest? A social curation site for collecting and displaying links as images Users pin images representing web content Each pin links back to the original page Pins are arranged by topic Pins on the same topic go on the same board Any pin on the site can be easily repinned to your own boards 80% of all pins are repins (rjmetrics, 2012)

3 Pinterest

4 How Do I Find Pins to Repin? Browsing Popular and Category Pages Search Social Browsing (Lerman and Jones, 2007) Follow other users and their pins will appear in your home feed

5 Following (Tie Formation) On most mainstream social networks, most connections are real-life connections Most Facebook friends are real-life friends (Ellison, Steinfeld, & Lampe, 2006, 2007, 2001) Survey: top reason for friending on Facebook is knowing [them] in real life (Nielsen & NM Incite, 2011) Pinterest following based on interest homophily Role of people is played down; content emphasized (Zarro, Hall, and Forte, 2013; Han et al, 2014)

6 Our Question How successful is this model of following? Following and social browsing (the home feed) are heavily promoted by Pinterest for content discovery But are they useful for that purpose?

7 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

8 How do we know when a user finds content they enjoy?

9 Content Discovery == Reposting Pinterest s ethos encourages people to take home pins they enjoy Repin post a pin from another user onto your own board Like express appreciation/enjoyment for a pin, as well as add it to your likes area Often used to save uncategorized content Comment very rare Repins : comments = 150: 1

10 Data Collection We crawled Pinterest to collect these actions No API, so we had to scrape Many difficulties involved Multithreaded, robust crawler ran for 5 weeks December 2013-January 2014 Due to constraints, sampled from each user 5 boards per user, randomly chosen

11 Data Model

12 Dataset Crawled Users 31,644 Total Users touched 5.4 million Crawled Boards 163,300 Total Boards Touched Total Pins Crawled Total Repins Total Likes 5.1 million 14 million 7 million 1.56 million Total Comments 47,557

13 Activity Distributions Per user Per Pin

14 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

15 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

16 Followers and Interaction On most OSNs, the majority of links are weak ones They exist, but little interaction E.g. Facebook (Marlow et al, 2009); Twitter (Huberman et. al, 2008) But on Pinterest, following and interacting are both supposed to be based on interests, not relationships You follow someone because you re interested in their content You repin/like/comment-on their content because you re interested in it So we should see a large % of followers interacting with content

17 But We Don t Proportion of each user s followers who have ever interacted with any of their crawled pins.

18 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

19 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

20 Where is the Activity Coming From? On average (median) 76% of activity comes from non-followers Contrast with Flickr: 29% of activity is from nonfollowers (for non-featured photos) (Lerman and Jones, 2007) Maybe it s just a few prolific non-followers skewing the percentages? Median # of non-followers who interacted: 34 Average # of interactions per non follower: 1.4 Median % of all unique interacters who are not followers: 88%

21 Activity Done by Followers

22 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users

23 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

24 Followers vs. Non-Followers The average follower who interacts with a user s content does 3.4 actions Average non-follower does 1.4 It seems that non-followers find one pin and take it home ; don t pay attention to the rest of the pins on the board Can we test this more empirically?

25 Featured Pins Popular page for pins from all over Pinterest Separate pages for each category Being featured (repinned) on one of these pages is frequently seen as the gateway to acquiring more followers (e.g. Cario, 2012) Clicking on a pin on a featured board takes you straight to the board it was repinned from

26 Featured Pins Experiment Crawled the Popular page 1,013X and saved a random pin from the first row each time

27 Featured Pins - Results An average pin on the Popular board got 673 repins, likes, and comments Min 111; 24% had > 1, times more activity (median) than an average pin on the same original board but 70% of boards whose pin was featured saw no extra activity on their other pins The other 30% got 1 extra action on their other pins for every 146 actions on the featured pin

28 Following after Interacting? 60% of boards and 56% of users did not gain a single follower 80% gained 3 or fewer followers Average gain of one new follower for every 450 repins, likes, and comments for those who gained at all. 15% added >= 7 followers Most already had 6-or-7 digit # of followers

29 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

30 Utility of the Follow Mechanism We identified 3 metrics for utility of the follow mechanism for content discovery Many of each user s followers find interesting content on the user s boards Users find a significant amount of their content on their followees boards When a user finds content they enjoy on the board of a user they don t follow, they: Explore the other pins on that board Follow that user to get more of their content

31 Why Isn t Following Used Much? Pinterest content is: Not relationship-specific Not time-bound so the live-stream home feed is not necessary And there are so many other options Search, Popular/Category pages If it s all at your fingertips, why wait until it shows up in your home feed in a week?

32 In many ways Pinterest is more like a miniature visual Web than it is an Online Social Network And users seem to understand that, and use it accordingly

33 Conclusion Pinterest heavily promotes following as a method for content discovery We ve showed that it s not actually very much used for this purpose People seem to be using Pinterest as a mini-web: searchable, browseable, with no network aspect necessary to find content

34 Thank You! to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that greatly improved the paper

35 Questions? Bluma Gelley NYU School of Engineering Ajita John Avaya Labs

36 Thank you!

arxiv: v1 [cs.si] 7 May 2014

arxiv: v1 [cs.si] 7 May 2014 Like, Comment, Repin: User Interaction on Pinterest Bluma Gelley New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering Brooklyn, NY bgelley@nyu.edu Ajita John Avaya Labs Basking Ridge, NJ, USA ajita@avaya.com